An empirical study of business process models and model clones on GitHub

Business process management entails a multi-billion-dollar industry that is founded on modeling business processes to analyze, understand, improve, and automate them. Business processes consist of a set of interconnected activities that an organization follows to achieve its goals and objectives. While the existence of business process models in open source has been reported in the literature, there is little work in characterizing their landscape. This paper presents the first characterization of business process models in open source, particularly on GitHub. The landscape is formed by 25,866 business process models across 4,954 repositories, with 16% of the repositories belonging to organizations. We discover that models belong to at least 16 domains including traditional software, machine learning, sales, business services, and financial services. These models are created using at least 28 different tools. Our exploration into cloning among the models shows that about 90% of all models are clones of each other. Application domains such as machine learning, traditional software, and business services demonstrate a higher occurrence of clones while in another dimension, clones are found across more repositories owned by industry as compared to those owned by academia. Also, contrary to code clones, we find that the majority of process model cloning occurs across multiple repositories. While our study acts as a precursor for future efforts to develop effective modeling practices in the field of business processes, it also emphasizes the need to address cloning and its implications in the context of reuse, maintenance, and modeling approaches.